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| VIEW EVENT INFORMATION: Bitcoin |
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Here's Why Bitcoin Price Is Reaching New Highs |
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Status: Available Now!
Type: News
Date: Tuesday 8 August 2017, 12:00 AM
Media: Mashable
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About the organization Bitcoin:
Type: Business
Sub-Types: Website, Money Transferring Agent, Computer Software, Digital Currency, Cryptocurrency |
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Notable Organizations: Bitcoin, Mashable
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| It's been an intense month for Bitcoin. It's gone through several big changes — an upgrade and a currency split — all of which potentially threaten the integrity of the network as it plods into uncharted territory.
The results, so far, have been stellar. Nothing has gone wrong, and sure, bad things can still happen, but for now we're in the clear. Bitcoin miners are happily mining, exchanges are exchanging, and users can trade or use their bitcoins as they please.
And not only is Bitcoin trading at an all-time high ($3,379 at the time this article was published), but the other Bitcoin — Bitcoin Cash, the one that split from the original on August 1 — is trading at $270 and is currently the fourth largest cryptocurrency with a $4.4 billion market cap.
With that said, let's take a look at the details and expectations for the cryptocurrency's future.
First, the vast majority of Bitcoin miners — the people who employ computing power to generate new bitcoins, powering the Bitcoin infrastructure — put their money where their mouths are. They started mining a new version of Bitcoin that didn't bring any huge changes yet but prepares the groundwork for a much more important upgrade called SegWit2x, which will fully go through in a couple of months.
You can read about this in more detail here; suffice to say adopting SegWit2x will make Bitcoin faster and cheaper to use. What's important is that this mini-upgrade, deployed at the end of July, went well; the Bitcoin wheels are spinning as usual and everything went as planned.
Secondly, Bitcoin was split into two versions, Bitcoin (BTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The two cryptocoins share history — they're essentially the same coin up until they split (this is technically called a fork) into two on August 1. From that moment onward they became two separate coins. The good side of this is that anyone who owned Bitcoin would get the same amount of Bitcoin Cash as well.
That everything would go well was far from a given. Bitcoin Cash was somewhat hastily created and there was concern over whether the fork would cause problems on the original Bitcoin network. Furthermore, in the beginning it was unclear in what situations the owners of Bitcoin would get their Bitcoin Cash as well — some exchanges, like Coinbase, said they would not support BCH (the company later reversed stance and said anyone who held BTC on the exchange on July 31 would get their BCH as well). |
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